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Assange & Sweden: 2 x Svensson

Prophetic screeds published almost ten years ago by one of Sweden's foremost jurists.


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Pelle Svensson is one of Sweden's leading and most respected jurists. He was born in Sollefteå in 1943; today he lives in Sundsvall.

Pelle's the author of five books.

  1. 1987: 'Rätten på din sida? Hur fungerar rättsstaten'
    ('The law on your side? How our judicial system works')
  2. 1995: 'Skymningslandet'
    ('Twilight Land')
  3. 1998: 'Sanningen om mordet på Olof Palme'
    ('The Truth About the Assassination of Olof Palme')
  4. 2005: 'Utan nåd: grymhet utan gräns'
    ('Without Mercy: Cruelty Without Limit')
  5. 2009: 'Quick: den stora rättsskandalen'
    ('Quick: The Big Judicial Scandal')

Note the fifth book is about the Thomas Quick scandal where Claes Borgström was implicated up to his eyeballs for seven years.

Pelle was also a champion wrestler, having won the Swedish championship in the 100 kg class 13 years in a row, the world championship in either 97 kg or 100 kg six times, and an Olympic silver medal in the 97 kg klass in Tokyo 1964. So he can sort out Borgström any day of the week.

Pelle went on the attack against corruption in the Swedish judicial system already in the 1980s, citing collusion between prosecutors, defence attorneys, and judges, something that hardly made him popular with his 'esteemed' colleagues.

He also went on the attack against another form of corruption in the Swedish judicial system, something that has ramifications yet today.

Pelle 1

Witch Trials of Men!

Published 28 June 1992 in Dagens Nyheter.

Under the pretence of free evidence assessment, courts are rendering verdicts without proof, says Pelle Svensson

Responsible Swedish men no longer have the right to a fair day in court. Our supreme court looks passively on as the lower courts render verdicts in direct violation of supreme court precedents. There's a travesty going on behind the closed doors of the courtrooms where men are being convicted by vengeful women, says jurist Pelle Svensson.

There are legal processes quietly taking place against Swedish men that the witch trials of the 1600s don't leave far behind. The debate hits a zenith when encountering the demand that a woman has a right to be believed when she accuses men of rape. Psychologists called as witnesses for the men on trial, who explain that the women aren't believable, are harassed and declared incompetent. The demand for evidence has sunk so low that courts are now convicting on the woman's accusations alone.

The era of the witch trials was characterised by the fact that the only proof of witchcraft was the accusation itself - the claim the witch was a witch.

Under the pretence of what we call 'free assessment of evidence' Swedish courts are today in our time, our era, letting themselves convict with no evidence. And the supreme court won't allow appeal because the supreme court must not re-evaluate the evidence used in the lower courts. This despite the fact that these verdicts are in direct conflict with the two most fundamental principles of Swedish law.

  1. The version of events as told by the accused shall be accepted until otherwise disproved.
  2. When confronted with conflicting versions, the court must choose the version most beneficial for the accused.

So I'm saying as a career defence attorney that Swedish men now in the 1990s are being sentenced to long prison terms despite their likely being innocent. These witch trials are also being carried out under considerable psychological pressure on the courts.

Brutal rapes, sometimes with fatal outcome, occur every year, especially in the early summer when women are scantily clad. Psychopaths with seriously warped attitudes towards women hide in the bushes, waiting for the slightest chance to attack a woman.

Public opinion rightfully demands that the police catch the culprits and that the courts dish out harsh sentences. A recent case of murder in Eskilstuna comes immediately to mind.

These brutal and despicable crimes put the entire psychological climate against the accused in the courtroom. I'll even go so far as to say that women's attitudes towards men are affected adversely by such events.

But I'm not talking about the rapists. For there's a pest worse than the plague that's hit us these past few years. Namely women who file complaints against their former husbands and boyfriends once they've separated, when they start fighting over property and custody of children.

These cases result in convicting verdicts with long prison sentences with absolutely no proof whatsoever and in direct conflict with the guidelines of our supreme court.

When an alleged rape or a series of rapes is mentioned so long after the fact, there is no crime scene to investigate and no means to obtain medical certificates to support the allegations.

It's enough the woman's 'believable' - that she's a good actor. She cries, shivers and shakes, insists she can't say a thing in the presence of her accused. Her counsel demands closed doors, the trial becomes secret with no public insight.

I have in many cases where I have been the public defender for such men reacted strongly to how the woman is allowed to bring in support staff from the women's shelter who also sit there and cry. Yes and even the woman's legal counsel will let the tears flow as if it were all Greek theatre. Most often the trial is adjourned because the woman has to recuperate and be carried out of the courtroom on a stretcher and into another room; hospital staff are summoned.

Impressed by this formidable demonstration of thespian effort, the court magistrates turn their condemning eyes to the accused with looks that can kill. After that it doesn't matter if the defence can show it was all theatre, if they can prove the woman was lying. The courts rush to the woman's rescue and make up their own explanations. She must have got it wrong because the theatre performance proves her testimony is accurate! And with additional testimony by psychologists who are also patrons of the arts, the accused is convicted - in flagrant violation of all rules for Swedish criminal trial proceedings.

The most recent case where an appeals court dared contradict the prosecutor, the psychologists, the Greek weepers, the women's shelter staff, the female criminal interrogators, et al was the so-called sex torture case in Gothenburg where the prosecutor asked for ten years prison. The motives for the woman lying turned out to be financial, a heated custody battle, and jealousy.

The district court had sentenced the man to eight years prison on the woman's story alone and in addition awarded her SEK 500,000 in damages. The woman can collect the money as soon as the verdict is official.

But the appeals court overturned the verdict and completely exonerated the man. And in a blind rage, the prosecutor and the woman's counsel went to the tabloids. Scandal! they cried. The man is still guilty! The appeals court magistrates were too old! Their attitude towards women wasn't modern! And so forth.

But that's also the last time reason prevailed. Nowadays men are convicted on assembly line basis.

And this goes on with the silent approval of our supreme court despite the verdicts being in direct conflict with the supreme court precedent from 15 February 1991 when the supreme court convicted the former boyfriend of a woman to three years in prison on the woman's testimony alone, with no medical certificate, no technical evidence whatsoever, all because the woman filed the complaint long after she'd separated.

But the supreme court also treated the judicial system to the following requirements in the future so further comparisons to the witch trials of the 1600s would no longer be possible.

  1. The woman may not have a strong motive for lying.
  2. Her version of events shall be long and coherent and with unique details.
  3. The woman must offer a reasonable explanation if she decides to significantly change her testimony.
  4. The woman cannot be found to have been lying in decisive sections of her testimony.
  5. There mustn't be anything suggesting her testimony isn't accurate.

Swedish district courts and appellate courts of today blatantly disregard these supreme court criteria which are supposed to be applied to all cases of alleged rape in domestic situations arriving long afterwards. And our supreme court does nothing.

The reason is that our supreme court does not reevaluate evidence. But the highest task of the highest court in a nation is that it must lead the practice of jurisprudence and enforce respect and obedience for its own precedents.

If an appellate verdict is in conflict with a precedent of the supreme court, the supreme court must absolutely review the case and show the lower court what the score is.

This is very important because the supreme court must remain the ultimate guarantor that innocents are not wrongfully convicted. The supreme court must ensure that elements of the witch trial era not gain a foothold in our modern judicial system. It is therefore I challenge the magistrates of our supreme court to duly study one of the most important civil rights situations in our time.

We cannot let a jealous vengeful woman - or a woman with financial motives - revenge former lovers, disarm them, throw them in prison for the foreseeable future, destroy them both physically and financially.

Please don't accuse me of having a negative view of women or of being dismissive of female criminal interrogators, prosecutors, legal counsel, women's shelter staff, and so forth. Of course most women who ask them for help really need it. But what I react against is how they seem to have lost the ability to see through in the cases where scorned women with a bit of theatre can exploit them, get everyone down on their knees, and thus smash the life of an innocent man into smithereens.

A few examples:

Two weeks ago, the Svea appellate court sentenced a man from Hallsberg to five and one half years prison solely on the testimony of the woman. The complaint was filed eight months after she and the man separated and the man had remarried. This is the most unbelievable verdict yet - one of the worst and most scandalous verdicts in our country's history.

The trial took place of course behind closed doors from beginning to end. No impartial insight whatsoever. The supreme court gets the case next week. The man has no priors and is known to be responsible and well-respected.

A man from Luleå is sentenced to ten years prison for a series of aggravated rapes of his adult daughter. No proof, only her accusations. The daughter even refused to go along with a gynecologist examination. She claimed she'd kept notes in a diary about the alleged assaults but refused to show this diary to the court. Her motivation for bringing the false accusation was revenge for having been born with a severe handicap which she'd always blamed on her parents. The man has no priors and is known to be responsible and well-respected. Ruling of the supreme court: appeal denied.

A man from Eskilstuna is sentenced to three years prison for rape despite his having a water-tight alibi. The appellate court merely notes that the two witnesses who corroborated the alibi must in some way have got their facts wrong. Appeal denied.

This particular case is especially interesting in that the chairman of the court did not agree and wanted to acquit. Yet despite this, the supreme court refused to review the matter.

To convict someone of a serious crime, the crime must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. There has to be reasonable doubt if the chairman of the appellate court wanted to acquit!

Well-behaved, well-respected, responsible Swedish men, with no prior convictions have, as I've shown in this article, no longer any right to a fair day in court. They are convicted without evidence in our latter day version of the witch trials and under the eyes of a passive supreme court that even lets the lower courts violate the precedents they themselves have laid down.

It gets even more serious for the man when the courts will in general grant the woman more believability and commonly favour milder sentences for women committing the very same crimes. Has the sex war come this far that men are now being discriminated against? This is a justified question.

The most reasonable demand of our judicial system is everyone's equality before the law and everyone's right to an open and impartial test of the criminal accusations.

Pelle 2

Sweden Pilloried

Published 6 September 1992 in Dagens Nyheter.

Men are sentenced to long prison terms with no evidence, says Pelle Svensson

This past summer, jurist Pelle Svensson spoke out about men being denied case reviews in the supreme court after being convicted of rape on no evidence at all. The courts are convicting without proof and solely on the credibility of the accusers, he writes and compares these trials to witch trials behind closed doors. Pelle Svensson has threatened to take a dozen cases to the European Court in Strasbourg if the Swedish supreme court won't respond.

On 28 June of this year I wrote an op-ed for DN entitled 'Witch Trials of Men'.

The article covered the question of burden of proof for convictions in criminal trials where a woman accuses a former boyfriend or husband of serious sex crimes taking place during their time together and where the accusations are made long after the couple have separated.

My conclusion was that our courts have lowered their demand for evidence so drastically that a conviction is possible if the courts decide the woman is more believable than the man. Forensic evidence from the crime scene - medical discoveries from gynecological examinations - are not available because the complaints are filed so long after the couples have separated. And there are no witnesses either because the alleged crimes have taken place in the couple's bedroom.

To convict solely on the accusation of another human being is the same as the witch trials and drags our country's jurisprudence back to the 1600s.

Despite my article dealing only with a small subset of rape cases (rape in domestic situations) leading female personalities have entered the debate and deliberately skewed my message to apply to all rape cases in general. They've even claimed I am heading a new trend whereby men will have the lawful right to rape their wives.

This is unfortunate. I stand for the rule of law and civil rights for all. So it's refreshing when a woman finally dares come forward in support of the main arguments in my demands and opinions. Civil rights professor Anna Christensen at Lund University wrote an op-ed in DN on 17 August, poking her finger in the eyes of all those female debaters who unilaterally claim that women hold a monopoly on the truth, women never lie, women have the right to be believed, and so forth. She justifiably claims that the traditionally high burden of proof that we have in our criminal cases must also apply to cases of rape, incest, and abuse.

When Swedish courts sentence men to long prison terms solely on the credibility of the woman, they also add to their notes that no significant motive was found for the woman to lie. This is incomprehensible when the complaint/accusation is made in connection with a separation which often encompasses betrayal, broken promises, custody and visitation rights, alimony, and apportioning of common property. Professor Anna Christensen puts it like this: 'relationships in a family can become so tainted with hate, so weird, so twisted and people spare no means to hurt each other or lose their ability to separate internal and external reality'. She goes on to say that cases where the woman is lying are not the norm - but they definitely exist.

By ruling solely with the credibility factor, our courts have lost the ability to sort out the cases where a woman lies out of a motive for revenge. And so innocents are wrongfully convicted. The convictions are so obnoxious that they even write in their rulings that the man is found guilty solely on his credibility.

They often write that the lack of gynecological evidence does not contradict the woman's testimony because healing could have taken place in the considerable time since the alleged crime. They're putting the burden of proof on the man. How is a man to prove he hasn't done what he's accused of? Produce evidence about something that's never happened?

And the women often demand the man sit in a separate room during the trial. She doesn't dare tell her tale in his presence! But for the time they lived together there's nothing similar documented.

The next step is to demand closed doors for the entire trial and to keep all court documents secret. The liar can then avoid all public insight and the man's counsel is denied the possibility of getting external support. How is a defence attorney to produce proof against the accusations when he's muzzled? These are latter day witch trials and fully comparable with trials taking place in dictatorship states.

To sentence an innocent to a long prison term is tantamount to ruining that person's life. Why is it reprehensible and against the rule of law to convict solely on credibility?

An otherwise very credible individual can give false testimony if the motive is strong enough. Conversely an otherwise unreliable individual can give accurate testimony if the motive is strong enough.

A woman's accusations must be corroborated by cited evidence. The proof in circumstantial cases consists of what we call evidential facts or 'helper facts'. If we have no such proof and if all we have is the woman's story and if this is used as 'proof', this means the court believes the woman. And we've thereby used the testimony itself as the proof the testimony is the truth.

So it's not enough the woman's testimony is credible - it has to be corroborated by evidential facts or helper facts.

In my previous article I cited a number of frightening examples of men who most likely have been wrongfully sentenced to severe prison sentences solely on the uncorroborated accusations of a woman.

Here's another one:

A man from Spånga is convicted of sex torture of his former girlfriend. Amongst other things he was to have burnt her legs with cigarettes. The chairman of the court disagreed with the verdict because a photo showed that the woman had had burn marks on her legs before she ever met the man. Despite this, a majority believed her testimony.

Our supreme court refused to grant an appeal because our supreme court will not reevaluate evidence.

We need new legislation so innocents aren't wrongfully convicted. Why is our minister of justice so silent about this? I will now bring together a dozen or so cases where men are sentenced to long prison terms without proof. Should our supreme court refuse to grant appeals, we'll then take matters to the European Court in Strasbourg. Sweden should be found guilty of crimes against humanity and it should at the same time be made clear for all to see that here in Sweden we are not protected by the rule of law.

The convention regulates the minimum rights of the accused in criminal cases. The main point being that the accused in criminal cases shall be presumed innocent until proven guilty. It must never be possible to convict without evidence. With a guilty verdict in Strasbourg, Sweden will be forced to release all who are wrongfully convicted and recompense huge sums in damages. The rule of law doesn't exist in Sweden any longer.

An innocent thought: why are all the other jurists in this country silent? Why am I standing alone against the feminist behemoth with its monopoly on the truth? Surely we need a new countermovement so Sweden isn't pilloried in Strasbourg!

Nobody knows where the mean little rat got off to. But wait! Ask Sven Erik Alhem - he knows!
 - Pelle Svensson
I'm working half-time at a law firm in Sundsvall. Leif Silbersky's over 70; if he can do it, so can I.
 - Pelle Svensson

See Also
Pelle Svensson's Twitter Feed

See Also
Justice4Assange.com
Assange Defence Fund
WikiLeaks: Support WikiLeaks
The Police Protocol (Translated)
Rixstep: JA/WL (Assange/WikiLeaks)
Rixstep: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed
Radsoft: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed

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